“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It is energy concentrated to a degree quite unbelievable to you. It contains potentials unlimited, but it must work out its own identity and form its own worlds. It carries within it the burden of all being. Within it are personality potentials beyond your comprehension. Remember, this is your own soul or entity I am speaking of, as well as soul or entity in general. You are one manifestation of your own soul. How many of you would want to limit your reality, your entire reality, to the experience you now know? You do this when you imagine that your present self is your entire personality, or insist that your identity be maintained unchanged through an endless eternity.

(10:43.) Such an eternity would be dead indeed. In many ways the soul is an incipient god, and later in this book we will discuss the “god concept.” For now, however, we will simply be concerned with the entity or soul, the larger self that whispers even now in the hidden recesses of each reader’s experience. I hope in this book not only to assure you of the eternal validity of your soul or entity, but to help you sense its vital reality within yourself. First of all, however, you must have some idea of your own psychological and psychic structure. When you understand to some extent who and what you are, then I can explain more clearly who and what I am. I hope to acquaint you with those deeply creative aspects of your own being, so that you can use these to extend and expand your entire experience.

First of all, a soul is not something that you have. It is what you are. I usually use the term “entity” in preference to the term “soul,” simply because those particular misconceptions are not so connected with the word “entity,” and its connotations are less religious in an organizational sense.

[...] The entity then, or greater self, is composed of souls. [...] The entity has its existence in multitudinous dimensions, its souls free to travel within boundaries that would seem infinite to you. As the smallest cell within your body participates to its degree in your daily experience, so does the soul to an immeasurably greater extent share in the events of the entity.

Souls are also creative psychic structures, ever-changing and yet always retaining individual integrity (pause), and all are dependent one upon the other. Souls make up the life of the entity in those terms. Yet the entity is “more” than the soul is. [...]

[...] A group of selves forms a soul. I am not telling you that you do not have a soul to call your own. (Again louder, with a smile:) You are a part of your soul. [...] The soul is not.

[...] Now another word for the soul is entity. You see it is not a simple matter of giving you a definition of a soul or entity, for even to have a glimpse in logical terms you would have to understand it in spiritual, psychic, and electromagnetic terms, and understand the basic nature of consciousness and action as well. But you can intuitively discover the nature of the soul or entity, and in many ways intuitive knowledge is superior to any other kind.

(10:44.) This physical perception in no way alters the native, basic, unfettered perception that is characteristic of the inner self, the inner self being the portion of the soul that is within you. The inner self knows its relationship with the soul. It is a portion of the self that acts, you might say, as a messenger between the soul and the present personality. You must also realize that while I use terms like “soul” or “entity,” “inner self,” and “present personality,” I do so only for the sake of convenience, for one is a part of the other; there is no point where one begins and another ends.

(9:42.) Your soul therefore — the soul that you are — the soul that you are part of — that soul is a far more creative and miraculous phenomenon than you previously supposed. And when this is not clearly understood, and when the concept is watered down for simplicity’s sake, as mentioned earlier, then the intense vitality of the soul can never be understood. Your soul, therefore, possesses the wisdom, information, and knowledge that is part of the experience of all these other personalities; and you have within yourselves access to this information, but only if you realize the true nature of your reality. Let me emphasize again that these personalities exist independently within and are a part of the soul, and each of them are free to create and develop.

(9:28.) The soul, therefore, or entity, endows three-dimensional reality, and the three-dimensional self with its own properties. The abilities of the entity lie within the three-dimensional self. [...] In learning to use these potentials, in learning to rediscover its relationship with the entity, the three-dimensional self raises still further the level of achievement, comprehension, and creativity. [...]

Not only is the entity strengthened, but portions of it, having been actualized in three-dimensional existence, now add to the very quality and nature of that existence. [...] The soul or entity then gives breath to the body, and to the three-dimensional self within it. [...]

Entities or souls, in other words, send out portions of themselves to open up avenues of reality that would not exist otherwise. [...] They must, however, come to understand their roles as actors, “finally” from their roles, and through another act of comprehension, return to the entity.

The soul composes that of which the entity is made. The soul is the portion of All That Is of which the entity is made. [...]

([Rachel:] “Are the soul and the entity the same thing?”)

The soul is the breath of the entity. [...]

[...] Your idea of the soul is indeed limited by your three-dimensional concepts. The soul can change the focus of its consciousness, and uses consciousness as you use the eyes in your head. [...] Soul or entity, then, is more than consciousness.

You may think of your soul or entity — though only briefly and for the sake of this analogy — as some conscious and living, divinely inspired computer who programs its own existences and lifetimes. [...]

[...] I must emphasize that I am not saying that the soul or entity is a computer, but only asking you to look at the matter in this light in order to make several points clear.

These interchanges represent periods in which the soul and flesh meet under the most optimum conditions. [...] The energy of the personal self constantly comes from the entity. There is not just one intersection of soul with the flesh, therefore, but at the least a constant series as you would think of it. [...]

Now: As there are better times than others in your sphere of activity for sending rockets or spaceships to the moon, so there are peak periods when the self and the soul (or entity) coincide — when communication is at its best.

[...] In the present then each person has unlimited opportunity to draw upon the entity’s energy, and the understanding and powers of all of its parts. [...] In the same way, every individual possesses the abilities of its entity in latent form. [...]

[...] The soul does not exist apart from nature. [...] Nature is the soul in flesh, in whatever its materializations. The flesh is as spiritual as the soul, and the soul is as natural as the flesh. In your terms the body is the living soul. Now the soul can live, and does, in many forms — some physical and some not, but while you are material, the body is the living soul. The body constantly heals itself, which means that the soul in the flesh heals itself. The body is often closer to the soul than the mind is because it automatically grows as a flower does, trusting its nature.

[...] Your body is composed of other living entities, in other words. [...] You are not a soul encased in inert clay.

I can see that my analogy comparing the soul to an organ within a multidimensional psychic structure of the entity is confusing you. We will clear it up by comparing the same properties, changing the word “soul” to read “oversoul.”

As earlier mentioned (at 10:20 in the 637th session), and simply following the analogy, each self has its own soul within the oversoul, and the oversoul is itself a part of the entity’s multidimensional structure.

(Seth had already given the heading for Chapter Ten, but as we sat for the session now I reminded Jane of her questions about group souls, as described at the end of the 637th session. [...]

There is no need to create a separate god who exists outside of your universe and separate from it, nor is there any need to think of a soul as some distant entity. [...] “His” energy forms your identity, and your soul is a part of you in the same manner.

In larger terms, my soul includes my reincarnational personalities, Seth Two, and probable selves. [...] Your concept of the soul is simply so limited. I am not really speaking in terms of group souls, though this interpretation can also be made.

Each “part” of the soul contains the whole — a concept I am sure will startle you. As you become more aware of your own subjective reality you will therefore, become familiar with greater portions of your own soul. When you think of the soul as a closed system you perceive it as such, and close off from yourself the knowledge of its greater creativity and characteristics.

[...] There are probable gods as there are probable men; but these probable gods are all a part of what you may call the soul of, or the identity of, All That Is; even as your probable selves are all a portion of your soul or entity.

Now these facts do not deny the validity of the soul, but instead add to it immeasurably.

The soul can be described for that matter, as a multidimensional, infinite act, each minute probability being brought somewhere into actuality and existence; an infinite creative act that creates for itself infinite dimensions in which fulfillment is possible.

(Pause at 10:20.) Now in terms of psychology as you understand it, the soul could be considered as a prime identity that is in itself a gestalt of many other individual consciousnesses — an unlimited self that is yet able to express itself in many ways and forms and yet maintain its own identity, its own “I am-ness,” even while it is aware that its I am-ness may be part of another I am-ness. [...] There is, in other words, a give and take between souls or entities, and no end of possibilities, both of development and expansion. Again, the soul is not a closed system.

The soul, however, does not need to follow the laws and principles that are a part of the physical reality, and it does not depend upon physical perception. The soul’s perceptions are of acts and events that are mental, that lie, so to speak, beneath physical events as you know them. The soul’s perceptions are not dependent upon time, because time is a physical camouflage and does not apply to nonphysical reality.

It goes without saying then that the soul does not require a physical body for purposes of perception; that perception is not dependent upon physical senses; that experience continues whether or not you are in this life or another; and also that the soul’s basic methods of perception are also operating within you now even as you read this book. [...] It also follows that some hints of the soul’s direct experience can be gained by momentarily switching the physical senses off — by refusing to use them as perceptors, and falling back upon other methods. [...]

In that 8th session Seth gave us more material on fragments: “In some submerged manner all fragments of a personality exist within an entity, with their own individual consciousnesses. They are not aware of the entity itself…. The entity operates its fragments in what you would call a subconscious manner, that is, without conscious direction. The entity gives the fragments independent life, then more or less forgets them…. [...] Then Jane dictated a key sentence: “Fragments of another sort, called personality fragments, operate independently, though under the auspices of the entity.”

4. Jane and I had always thought of transmigration (or metempsychosis) as meaning the birth of a human soul in just animal form. Actually, however, the term refers to the journey of the soul into any form, whether human, animal, or inanimate—thus differing from the ordinary doctrine of reincarnation, or rebirth into the same species. [...] Seth, in Session 705 for June 24, 1975, in Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality: “There is no transmigration of souls, in which the entire personality of a person ‘comes back’ as an animal. [...] In Note 2 for Session 840, in Mass Events, I’m quoting Seth from the 838th session for March 5, 1979: “I want to avoid tales of the transmigration of the souls of men to animals, say—a badly distorted version of something else entirely.”

[...] Within another couple of sessions, however, he began to let “fragment” semantically yield to other terminology as he continued developing his material in ever-deepening discussions of personalities and entities, reincarnation, time, dreams, and other related subjects. [...]

(10:50.) If you think, however, that the self as you know it is the end or summation of yourself, then you also imagine your soul to be a limited entity bounded by its present ventures in one life alone, to be judged accordingly after death on the performance of a few paltry years.

You have been trying to squeeze the soul into tight concepts of the nature of existence, making it follow your limited beliefs. The door to the soul is open, and it leads to all the dimensions of experience.

[...] The soul stands both within and without the fabric of physical life as you know it. [...]

(Long pause at 9:50.) A death is but one night to the soul. The vaster entity of which you are part follows your progress as easily as you follow your own through the days. [...] In those terms the entity wakes up as a different person each day, in a different century, each life seeming like a day in its level of experience. [...]

[...] So the entity in its own way possesses what you can think of as future neuronal structures. [...]

(Slowly at 10:03:) Each part is vital, and in one way or another there is instant communication between the smallest and the largest, the cobweb and the spider, the man, the entity, and the star — and each spins its own web of probabilities from which other universes continually spring.

[...] I said that these units could operate as entities, and as forces, so we are not speaking of a mental mechanics but of entities in the true meaning of the word: entities of unimaginable creative and psychic properties, purposeful fragments propelled from the infinite mind as that mind was filled with the inspiration that gave light to the world. Those entities, in your terms so ancient, left fragments of themselves in trance (underlined), so to speak, that form the rocks and hills, the mountains, the air and the water, and all of the elements that exist on the face of the earth.

[...] It is not simply that man has a soul that is somehow blessed while the rest of him is not, but that in those terms everything [he knows], regardless of size or degree, is made of “soul stuff.” [...]

(A one-minute pause at 9:13.) Those entities are in trance, in those terms, but their potency is not diminished, and there is constant communication among them always.

(Jane’s question arose out of material in the 560th session in Chapter Fourteen: She wanted to know the name of the third personality making up the three-part Christ entity that Seth has postulated. [In Chapter Eighteen of Jane’s own book, The Seth Material, Seth gave as members of this entity Christ, of course, and John the Baptist.] I told Jane now that I thought Seth intended to go into this whole matter much more thoroughly later in this book.

In so doing, the soul continually creates new varieties of inner reality to be explored. Working in the opposite direction, so to speak, the soul divests itself of all symbols, all representations, and using its consciousness in a different way learns to probe its own direct experience. [...]

[...] In this stage of consciousness the soul finds itself alone with its own feelings, stripped of symbolism and representations, and begins to perceive the gigantic reality of its own knowing.

2. A reminder: Seth usually calls Jane by her male entity name, Ruburt — and thus “he,” “him,” etc.

[...] In addition to Seth’s volume, these sometimes resulted in very creative products of her “own”: Some of the psychic experiences connected with her book of poetry, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time, which she began in November, 1972, are described in the 639th session in Chapter Ten. [...]

4. See Seth’s very acute discussions of the soul (or entity) in sessions 526–28 for Chapter 6 of Seth Speaks. He came through with many excellent points. I’ve always been intrigued by the remark he made just before 10:43 in the 526th session: “You are one manifestation of your own soul.” [...] A group of selves forms a soul. I am not telling you that you do not have a soul to call your own. You are a part of your soul. [...]

People have written here asking about soul mates.³ In certain circles this is the latest vogue. [...] They spend time searching for their soul mates — but the search involves them in a pilgrimage for a kind of impossible communication with another, in which all division is lost, with the two then trying to join in a cementing oneness, suffocating all sense of play or creativity. You are not one part, or one half, of another soul,⁴ searching through the annals of time for your partner, undone until you are completed by your soul mate.

3. Our dictionary defines a soul mate as one of the opposite sex with whom an individual “has a deeply personal relationship” — a mundane enough description. [...] Then we began to get letters from readers who either asked for Seth’s help in finding soul mates, or for his verification that such counterparts had, indeed, already been located.

[...] Split entities. One whole entity may need several manifestations, even at simultaneous so-called times.

(“Are animals entities?”)

[...] But the soul has peepholes. [...]